A place for me to talk about my knitting and whatever else crosses my mind. I love making things with my hands (cross stitch, paint by number, food) and hopefully you will enjoy seeing my work.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

I think I may need a sponsor!

Blogger is kicking my ass. This is the first part of the post above. Enjoy in whatever order you like.

So I went to Knit Knackers on Friday and bad bad things happened. The owner - who is perfectly lovely - had ordered an Ashford Turkish drop spindle for me so I went in to pick it up. While I was looking around I saw some Mulberry silk that should ply well with the Fleece Artist that I'm working on right now. While we were chatting the owner offeres me a taste of some raw fleece that she's working on right now. It's in the small bag between the spindle and the silk nolis that I'm going to try once I grow another set of arms.The fleece is Rambouillet and was pretty interesting to work with. I learned alot about the processing of fleece and even more about why my last attempt with Wilton's dye may have gone awry. What follows is in chronological order.

The precious, it isn't alot but it was free and it will be some thing fun to try. Is it supposed to smell this much (turns out the answer is yes)

Man was he ever dirty. Most of the VM was already taken care of but there was still some grass and bits to take out. A little Euculan seems to be taking care of the smell. It took about three washes before I was convinced he was clean.

Here we are all clean and much less smelly - now he just smells like lovely wet wool. The crimp is still very obvious (I'm glad - I was afraid I might have felted the bunch while I was scouring him).